Sioux City, IA- $2 Million Needed to Upgrade Siouxland Emergency Radio System

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$2 million needed to upgrade Siouxland emergency system

 

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Get ready to see a lot more articles like this now that these multimillion dollar systems that are "several" years old are falling apart, no longer supported and in need of millions more dollars and Uncle Sam isn't offering any money to pay for it.

 

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And, this is truly unfortunate. I had the occasion to be in several classes with Gary Brown (of "Flight 232" fame) from Woodbury County some years ago and took the occasion to pack the family and go visit my wife's relatives in Sioux City (albeit in -7 degree weather) in 2007 and take a listen to the radio system. The notion that there could be a 3-state multijurisdictional radio system is still visionary. After all, every elected official (sheriff's included) knows that radio signals and mutual aid stops at the border. But apparently not there. When you sign onto an infrastructure-dependent system, you also have to commit to everything that goes with it. That means firmware updates and component lifecycle sunsets. The big business for manufacturers is not that they sold a multi-million dollar radio system, it's that as soon as GSA commitment to support requirements are up, they're going to sell another multi-million dollar radio system. That's all well and good when a grant is paying for it (all of "our" money, instead of local residents' "our" money), but now comes the hard part. Here's an advanced system in an area that did need it, but without the push from grants probably did not have the tax base to support it as their own initiative. Now what? I'd expect to see a number of local referendum ballot issues for a special taxing district just for STARCOMM.